Kansei Studies

Kansei Studies

Kansei (感性?) is a Japanese word that covers the meanings of sensitivity, sensibility, and intuition in English and is akin to the German concept of Ästhetik. Researchers have proposed three major definitions for its applicability in psychology and design:

• In 1998, Prof. Akira Harada collected 60 definitions provided by researchers involved in the research related to Kansei, and analyzed the responses statistically. This arrived at five major dimensions of kansei:
  1. Kansei is a subjective and unexplainable function.
  2. Kansei, besides its innate nature, consists of the cognitive expression of acquired knowledge and experience.
  3. Kansei is the interaction of intuition and intelligent activity.
  4. Kansei is the ability of reacting and evaluating external features intuitively.
  5. Kansei is a mental function creating images.
• In 2005, Dr. Simon Schütte, working on Kansei Engineering, recalled Prof. Nagamachi's proposition and defined kansei as an individual subjective impression from a certain artifact, environment or situation using all the senses of sight, hearing, feeling, smell, taste, recognition and balance.
• In 2005, Dr. Pierre Lévy proposed to describe kansei as a mental sense of subjectivity.